


From the Woods (The Wolves and Woodcutters Remix)

by sanguinity



Category: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Gen, Remix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-03
Updated: 2015-08-03
Packaged: 2018-04-12 18:04:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4489428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sanguinity/pseuds/sanguinity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Johanna Mason knows exactly how much damage a sawblade can do.</p>
            </blockquote>





	From the Woods (The Wolves and Woodcutters Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [paperclipbitch](https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperclipbitch/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Beyond The Woods](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2241171) by [paperclipbitch](https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperclipbitch/pseuds/paperclipbitch). 



> A "parallel-but-different" re-imagining of paperclipbitch's "Beyond the Woods," which explored Johanna's life as a Victor. For this remix, I grounded District Seven in logging country, so the reader will find that many details here differ from the original.
> 
> FYI, this story draws heavily on an old logging-country song, "The Frozen Logger." _(No one but a logger stirs his coffee with his thumb!)_ Lyrics vary between versions; the ones I used are in the notes at the end.
> 
> Many thanks to my generous and brilliant betas, amindamazed and grrlpup.  
>  
> 
>  **Warnings for:** sexual assault, coerced prostitution, canon-typical violence, and industrial injuries (dismemberments and fatalities both). None of it is graphic, but this is Panem: it stacks up quickly.

For three summers, from the year she was fifteen and strong enough to carry a seventy-pound pack of Douglas fir seedlings, to the summer that the Peacekeepers took her to her first Reaping, Johanna volunteered for summer tree planting.

It was grueling work: walk six steps, sink the shovel and lever open a hole in the earth, drop a seedling in the hole, push upright again under the pack’s weight, tamp the earth closed with a boot heel, lurch six more steps uphill. She worked without a Peacekeeper overseer, but the tracker in her arm monitored her crossings and re-crossings of her worksite, counting the number of times she paused-crouched-straightened-stomped and compared it to the number of seedlings she had been issued. (The second summer, the seedlings in one of the weekly airdrops were dead, their needles already brown and shedding. Johanna planted them anyway, rather than risk drawing attention.)

But if one could withstand the labor, the job had its perks. The rations were ample, which made it just possible to go for three months without pay, and the assignment afforded three months of near-perfect freedom. Late each June, the work coordinator would leave Johanna, her gear, and her first week’s water, rations, and seedlings at the side of a road near her assigned worksite. Barring the need to be transferred to a new clear-cut, that would be the last Johanna saw of anyone until late September. As long as all the seedlings got planted, no one cared what Johanna did with the rest of her time.

There was plenty to do, in a lazy, not-doing-a-thing sort of way. There was a tiny, vining blackberry that proliferated in the clearcuts, its fruit sometimes sweet and sometimes mouth-puckeringly tart. Huckleberries overran the clearings like wildfire, their leaves gone flame-red by season’s end. There was wildlife, too, the open space a magnet for deer, each doe stern and imposing in the protection of her speckled fawns.

Mostly, though, there were the views. Every time she attained a ridgetop, the crazy-quilt of District Seven lay spread out below her, each subtly-different patch of green signifying the age of the lot’s replanting. At Paul Bunyan’s height, that rectangular patchwork resembled the young, green wheat fields of District Nine. But it was that very difference in scale that separated loggers from farmers: no one in Nine had ever been crushed under a blade of wheat that twisted and fell in the wrong direction. 

At some worksites, Johanna could see all the way to the long line of isolated snowpeaks that stretched to the north and south; at others, she couldn’t see farther than the opposite ridge. Either way, summer tree-planting was a far cry from the rest of her life. In the sawchain factory where Johanna had worked since she was twelve, the haze of oil and coolant mists hung so thick that she couldn’t see even the opposite wall.

Johanna enjoyed the solitude of those clear-cuts. For three months of the year she didn’t have to guard her expressions, didn’t have to watch what she said and to whom. Perhaps she spent too much time talking to the jays and ground squirrels, promising vengeance for their repeated assaults on her ration pack, but as long as her mask was in place again by late September, she had three months to say and do as she liked.

But as wonderful as the freedom of tree-planting was, the greatest perk of the job was its tacit permission to ignore the Hunger Games. Viewing was mandatory in Seven’s mills and factories, and even the logging camps had satellite links and mobile screens for the Games. But someone had decided that it was too expensive to feed the Games to each of the few dozen geographically-isolated tree planters, and from July through September, Johanna was one of the few people in Panem who didn’t think about the Games at all.

So when a Peacekeeper hovercraft appeared in the sky during Johanna’s third summer of tree-planting, she assumed it was to discipline her for some imagined error in her work. _(Imagined_ , because Johanna did not make careless mistakes, and the job was too important to her to throw away on meaningless defiances.) It wasn’t until she was standing on the Reaping stage later that same day, the ridiculous Capitol escort on one side and three grim-faced Victors flanking her on the other, that the truth of it finally came home. She burst into tears, having mislaid her poker-face during five weeks alone in the woods.

She had composed herself by the time she said good-bye to her parents, but according to Blight, her new mentor, the damage was done.

“No one wants to throw their money away on a tribute who cracks at the first sign of pressure,” Blight told her, as the tribute train sped through the dark. “Even District Seven loyalists are going to put their money on Svein before you.” Svein came from some other part of the District. All Johanna knew about him was what she had seen onstage: thirteen, slight for his age, and terrified. Johanna was the clearly superior candidate for survival in the Arena.

“But I’m strong!” she pleaded. “I’m strong and I’m tough, I know how to put my weight against a tool and make a single stroke count. And I’ve got experience living rough in the woods! You can’t write me off yet!”

Blight shrugged. During his own Games, he had been a towering wall of muscle, eighteen years old and already working as a lumberjack. He was no less massive now, but his body had long since gone soft at the margins from a Victor’s life. “Don’t worry about my opinion. It’s the sponsors who have written you off.”

“So how do I get them back?” she demanded.

Blight looked at her, impassive. She could not find a shred of hope in his face.

 _So that’s it,_ she thought, _I have to survive this without sponsors._

By sunrise, the tribute train had come to the expansive, arid rangelands of District Ten. Johanna had thought she knew distant horizons and open land, but back home, open land had always had a furthest edge, and it burst into new life the instant the slash-piles burned out. This barren, empty wasteland, stripped from one horizon to the other of anything and everything, filled Johanna with dread.

Blight found her curled against the glass with tears on her face, mourning a life she would never see again. She could _see_ him thinking that she wouldn’t amount to much in the Arena, just one more broken corpse in the shadow of the Cornucopia. “Breakfast,” he informed her, and turned away, already dismissing her from his list of things to consider.

 _I can use that,_ she thought in a moment of ruthless clarity, her first since the hovercraft had appeared twenty-four hours before. _I can use that._ She sniffled one more time, and meekly followed Blight in to breakfast.

  

No one expected much of District Seven during the Seventy-First Hunger Games, not until Johanna Mason threw off her sheep’s clothing and revealed the wolf’s teeth beneath.

Then Johanna learned two things.

Woodcutters _hate_ wolves. She became an instant pariah back home, never mind that she was nowhere near Svein when he died. It was enough, in their minds, that she _might_ have allied with him, might have kept him alive somewhat longer than he had managed on his own. Svein was the innocent child, the martyr, the fair-haired boy too good for this world, whereas Johanna was the conniving wolf who had pulled a trick straight out of the Capitol’s playbook. As far as District Seven was concerned, Johanna might have gobbled little Svein down herself. If she had friends before the Arena, she didn’t have them after.

(What she had instead was a _house_. A house that advertised to everyone that she was Capitol now.)

She also learned that the wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing gambit only works once, and she still had to survive life as a Victor. “Watch your step,” Blight warned her. “The Capitol owns you now. Don’t become like Haymitch.”

“Why? What happened to Haymitch?” Johanna asked, in what would be the last naive question of her life.

Blight simply looked at her, the same depthless and implacable gaze he had given her when she asked how to win the sponsors back, and Johanna discovered that even outside the Arena, she could still feel fear. “You’re better off asking what happened to Haymitch’s girl and his family,” Blight said. “But don’t ask him.”

Later that night, Cesar Flickerman, his hair and lips dyed forest-green in her honor, chuckled over Johanna’s good fortune in acquiring a pair of throwing axes in the Arena. After all, she must have been using axes since she was six years old!

Johanna didn’t correct his idiocy. No one in Seven used _axes_ , and even if they did, they wouldn’t be _throwing axes_. The loggers of Seven used chainsaws and mechanical harvesters, which came with Peacekeeper-controlled kill switches. After all, the most harm you could do with a non-operational chainsaw was to toss it at someone like a rock; a saw’s chain bar was so flimsy that you couldn’t even turn the machine around and swing it like a club. The thought of the Peacekeepers allowing a lumberjack to get his hands on an honest-to-god _axe?_ The idea was laughable.

So Johanna laughed, but she still held her tongue and agreed that it had been a lucky break. She played along with Flickerman, telling him she had been handling axes since she was little, receiving her first hatchet as a teething-toy. Flickerman mimed a baby energetically gumming an axe-blade, and feeling ridiculous, Johanna joined him.

“So we won’t see you sharpening your teeth like Enobaria, then?” he asked.

“Haven't you heard? Loggers are tougher than steel. When we die, they turn our bodies into sawblades.”

Flickerman laughed and had the grace not to mention Svein.

After the interview, the Parakeet (as Johanna had dubbed her chirping Capitol escort) sat Johanna down and informed her of the Capitol’s expectations of its victors. Johanna would find herself an appropriately media-friendly talent, she would exalt the greatness of the Capitol on her Victory Tour, she would mentor Seven’s future tributes, and she would be publicly grateful for the opportunities the Capitol had given her. More chillingly, she would also ‘entertain’ selected Capitol dignitaries.

The games might be fought by children, but they were never won by them. The Capitol had prostituted Finnick Odair since he was fourteen; Johanna was about to turn eighteen and could expect no mercy on account of her youth. But, the Parakeet reassured her, patting her hand, she musn’t concern herself with that just yet. Victors were always given a little time to settle into the role; after all, the Capitol wasn’t _cruel_. But that winter, when the Victory Tour reached the Capitol, Johanna should expect to be given several opportunities to demonstrate her gratitude to President Snow’s most favored friends.

Blight’s words pounded in time with her heartbeat. _Don’t become like Haymitch. Don't become like Haymitch._ She suddenly understood Enobaria’s glitteringly vicious smile, every tooth sharpened to a razor’s edge and inlaid with gold to draw to draw one's eye to their wicked danger. That smile wasn’t Enobaria delighting in her own savagery. It was an _advertisement_ of her savagery, an attempt to frighten off the kinds of suitors to whom she wasn’t allowed to say no.

Johanna moved into her empty, ugly house, her days filled with anger and dread. She took up chainsaw sculpture as her talent, mostly for the growl of a saw in her hands and the opportunity to fill stylish Capitol homes with the ugliest art imaginable. As revenge went, it was as toothless as her Peacekeeper-controlled chainsaw.

Blight was the only District Seven victor who had ever handled a chainsaw—the majority of Seven’s people worked in mills and factories, not as loggers—so Blight was the one to instruct her in the machine’s use. He blinked in mild surprise at the chrome plate and titanium inlays of Johanna’s Capitol-supplied machine, then shrugged. “As long as it cuts,” he said, and set it among his filthy tools, relics of his lumberjack days. He showed her how to mix the fuel, to mount and tension the chain. “No point in showing you how to sharpen it, you’re not on a board-feet-per-chain-foot budget. But whatever you do, don’t stand in the plane of the bar, and don’t touch the upper part of the bar tip to the wood.”

Johanna’s eyes narrowed, studying the bar and chain. “Why not?”

“Because that chain moves at sixty miles an hour.” He indicated the motion: out along the top of the bar, back along the bottom. “Cut with the bottom of the bar, and the friction of chain against the wood will drag the saw away from you; cut with the top, it’ll push the saw back toward you. But if you touch the top half of that curve to the wood…”

Johanna suddenly saw it: the chain catching the wood, and the saw leaping up and back, turning against its wielder with lightning-speed.

“Kickback. Happened to a friend of mine,” Blight said, as blandly as if he had been discussing the weather. “Don’t think you can control it. Stronger guy than me, and he still ended up with a running saw buried in his skull.”

 _Remember!_ every sawchain package had warned Johanna, back when she still made chain for a living, _If it can cut wood, it can cut you._ Two thousand packages a day and the empty one she held in her hand: _If it can cut wood, it can cut you._

The days rolled by. Johanna made terrible, ugly art, and the Victory Tour began.

Irritatingly, some damn fool in the Capitol press corps had found the frozen logger song Johanna had mentioned in her interview. It followed her everywhere she went, along with axe-themed jewelry and pine-boughs woven into bouffant Capitol updos. _(The sap!_ Johanna thought in fascinated horror, the first time she saw it. _In their hair!)_ When some grinning idiot finally trapped Johanna with a cup of steaming coffee in front of a bank of cameras, wanting her to demonstrate how tough District Seven loggers were, Johanna, fresh out of fucks to give and thinking of Enobaria’s teeth, stared straight into the lenses and plunged her thumb into the mug.

It didn’t hurt as much as she expected. The nerve on the inner half of that thumb had been dead for years, due to an injury at the factory when she was fourteen. Furthermore, she had been handling hot metal parts and naked sawchain barehanded since she was twelve, not to mention her three summers of heavy labor with a shovel: not even Beauty Base Zero could remove her industrial-strength calluses. Nevertheless, “it didn’t hurt as much as she expected,” was a far, far cry from “didn’t hurt at all.”

Johanna held her thumb deep in the steaming liquid and refused to flinch. Losing a thumb was nearly a District Seven tradition; hardly any of the older folks had intact hands. Most amputations were from industrial accidents—the human body was roughly the same size, shape, and consistency as lumber—but more than a few residents had lost their digits through sheer stupidity. Her schoolteacher had lost half of his hand wiping sap from a running sawblade, whereupon he had been put in charge of the children’s education. It was anyone’s guess what he was meant to teach Johanna and her classmates, but Johanna’s main takeaway had been that self-disfigurement was a quick ticket to a cush job.

Johanna supposed she was more like that damn-fool teacher of hers than she had thought, scalding her thumb in hot coffee in the hope that it would intimidate the Capitol patrons. Lord knew she wasn’t doing it to prove her allegiance to a District that didn’t want her. She stared down the cameras, made two languid and excruciating swishes through the hot liquid—no sugar, no milk, there was no conceivable point to any of this beyond the show—then calmly withdrew her thumb, shook it dry, and reached for the mug to take a sip.

That night, the clip played with the rest of the day’s Victory Tour highlights. A painfully tacky version of the song blared over the top:

> _I see you are a logger, and not a common bum,_  
>  _For no one but a logger stirs his coffee with his thumb!_

Johanna’s image stared out of the screen at her, calm, cool, and more than a little crazy.

The next day, Johanna’s escort handed her the revised schedule of Capitol dignitaries she was expected to entertain, and Johanna learned what Enobaria must have learned years before: it was impossible to scare off the Capitol patrons. You only drew the ones who aspired to tame someone dangerous.

_Don’t become like Haymitch._

Two days before they reached the Capitol, Johanna had the best luck possible for a young Victor: her parents died. The Parakeet took her aside and gravely told her that her father had fallen into a hot chemical bath at the veneer plant where he worked, and then became trapped under the floating logs. Her mother had died in the effort to get him out again. It was ridiculously like her parents, one of them dying for the other. When she was little, Johanna had wanted a relationship like theirs, but since the Games, that kind of love had become something to dread.

To Johanna’s own surprise (and the Parakeet’s shock), Johanna laughed at the news. Laughed that her parents had been so lucky as to die meaningless deaths; laughed that the Capitol’s shortsighted disregard for guardrails had severed its power over her. Her mother, at least, had died on her own terms, and both of them had escaped the eventual death sentence that Johanna's victory imposed on them.

That night, with a free heart, Johanna fought back against the dignitary the Capitol meant to sell her to. She fought like she was in the Arena again, tooth and nail and any weapon she could lay hands on, confident in the knowledge that there was no one her actions could hurt but herself.

Of course the Peacekeepers hurt her for it afterwards. But Johanna laughed through her beating—laughed until she couldn’t laugh for screaming—and cherished her good fortune that everyone she loved was dead.

  

It took barely a year for Johanna to learn that everything in the Capitol was a lie. Everything, that is, but its ruthless displays of wealth and power.

During her Victory Tour, there had been a long colonnade of massive oaks through the center of Victors Park, flanked by many more trees in an impressive variety of shape, texture, and color. All were in full leaf, as if it wasn’t the dead of winter. Back in Seven, Johanna had never seen a tree that didn’t need to compete with its neighbors for light, but each of these was as perfectly formed as if it had never wanted for anything in its long, long life.

It was nothing like home, of course. Her corner of Seven was all close-planted Douglas fir, and the only oaks were scrubby, twisted things that clung to dry cliff-faces. Yet Johanna had stood in Victors Park under those enormous, spreading canopies, fresh from the news of her parents’ deaths, and felt a connection to a world that was older and grander than the glittering show of power that consumed the Capitol. For all of their unnatural and unseasonable leaf, the trees felt _real_ to Johanna in a way that so little in the Capitol did.

When Johanna returned to the Capitol for the Seventy-Second Hunger Games, there were no trees in Victors Park.

“Brought them in for Seven’s Victory,” Blight said, while Johanna stared. “Same as when Lars and Duff won. Trees won't grow like that here, the elevation’s too high. So the minute they start looking ragged…” A gesture swept them all away.

Johanna was aghast. “They must have been older than Panem.”

Blight smiled ruefully, as much emotion as she had ever seen from him. “They make them into knick-knacks when they get rid of them. You’ll see.”

“Oh, Victors Park!” the Parakeet chirped, coming up from nowhere. Last year, the Parakeet’s hair had been iridescent greens; now it was all shimmering blue with flecks of gold. “Waiting and ready for the new display! It's always so boring when Seven wins, it’s all just _trees,_ but oh, you should have seen it when Finnick won! Aquarium bubbles, floating all over the park! Sharks and whales and giant squid! Performances every day! You could even swim with the sharks, that was a very high-end ticket! Oh, I just can’t _wait_ for Four to win again and you to see that, Johanna!”

And that was Capitol all over: the Parakeet nominally working for Seven’s victory, but unashamedly rooting for Four in the hope of better entertainments. Or the Capitol bringing in trees that had nothing to do with the actual reality in Seven, and yet going to mindboggling effort to ensure that they were the realest, oldest, most _authentic_ trees the procurers could lay hands on.

It was the Capitol's obsession with _authenticity_ that stuck in Johanna’s craw the most. Finnick Odair’s media strategy during his own Games had been as artificial as Johanna’s; arguably more so, given the price of his sponsored Trident. (Johanna did not believe for a second that anyone in Four fished with tridents. The notion was even more ridiculous than axes.) And yet Finnick was adored in the Capitol, “a young Neptune, born again in District Four,” as Claudius Templesmith had called him. Never mind that he had murdered eleven fellow tributes in the Arena: Finnick’s ruthless ambition, his Career background, and his expensive sponsor gifts were all in perfect alignment with each other, and he was adored for it.

Whereas Johanna, who had survived the Arena on nothing more than her guts and wits, and who had killed only three people doing it, was reviled throughout the Capitol as a sneaking, lying murderess.

(Her stylists once tried to talk her into high-fashion body-modifications to match the image: claws and a forked tongue to show off “her vicious inner nature.” Johanna turned them down, along with the rest of the “absolutely necessary” improvements her prep team advocated. For the moment, her body was the only thing that was still halfway hers.)

After fighting back against the man the Capitol tried to sell her to, Johanna had regained consciousness to find the media juggernaut against her had already begun. The TV commentators competed with each other to explain away Johanna’s “trick” of stirring her coffee with her thumb: the coffee had been pre-cooled with milk; the steam had been added in post; the camera angle made it only _appear_ she had put her thumb in the coffee. Never once did a commentator mention the real "trick" of it: nerve damage and callus from years of honest labor, and Johanna being too desperate to mind the pain. For five fleeting days—much of which she had spent unconscious—a casual flick of the thumb had been synonymous with an insouciant “fight me, I’ll like it” attitude. But by the time Johanna was awake from her beating, it had come to signify a blowhard and a liar.

It was a shame, she thought, that no one would ask her to repeat the trick: Johanna was reasonably sure that the beating had destroyed what remaining nerve function she had in that thumb.

 

No one tried to kill Johanna during the Seventy-Second Games, which made them a distinct improvement over the Seventy-First. But everywhere she went, hands grasped at her. Everyone seemed to think she was like one of the sharks from the celebration of Finnick's victory: tame and vulnerable in its precarious bubble of seawater and wholly owned by the Capitol. People thrilled to the fantasy that Johanna might turn and savage them at any moment, and yet their every touch betrayed their confidence that she never would.

Johanna longed to prove them wrong—to prove that she was still the wolf she had been in the Arena, not one of their tamed sharks—but Johanna was still moving slowly after her run-in with the Peacekeepers. If she was still a wolf, she was injured and alone, and didn’t have the courage for a second run-in with the Capitol.

In the meanwhile, the Parakeet made it very clear that the Capitol had not finished punishing Johanna. The Capitol would have its pound of flesh, and since Johanna hadn’t delivered up her own, they would take their pound and more in the Arena, from Seven’s tributes.

“The _sponsors,_ Johanna,” the Parakeet sighed. “You’ve offended them, and now what we’ll do, I have no idea. I pity these two, so _unlucky_ to have you for a mentor.”

“Of course they’re unlucky,” Johanna snapped, long past patience. Neither tribute was more than a year younger than Johanna, and yet they both seemed insufferably childlike. “If they were _lucky,_ they would never have met you.”

“Johanna!” the Parakeet snapped. “Your attitude!”

“You may have noticed,” Johanna sneered, “I didn’t get this gig by being a team player. Not that I noticed any team spirit toward _me_ last year.”

The Parakeet flushed, but Blight, as impassive as always, held Johanna’s gaze. Duff glared, as if she had embarrassed them by refusing to lay down and die in a puddle of tears. Lars, the third of the men who were supposed to have been her mentors, was decent enough to drop his eyes, which only enraged Johanna more. Lars was a gentle bear of a man, much beloved in the District, and Johanna found him perplexing and infuriating: by rights, no one who had lived through the Arena should come out the other side _nice_.

Johanna turned her attention on the two tributes, who both flinched away from her. And why not? They had watched her murder three people in tight focus, the blood spraying across their screens. According to the Capitol media juggernaut, Johanna was half-crazed and might do anything. She snarled at them. “I survived the Arena without sponsors. If you’re relying on a sponsor to save you, then you’re already as good as dead.”

Then she went to select an appropriate groveling-to-sponsors-dress from the arboreal-themed monstrosities she had been provided. She might be a half-crazed killer, but she wasn't cruel enough to leave Seven's tributes without sponsorship in the Arena.

That night, at one of the parties where sponsors and mentors gathered, the host drew Johanna away from the ballroom to “show her the furniture” in another room. He had been dangling the possibility of sponsorship for Seven’s tributes in front of her all evening, using that as bait to buy himself the opportunity to let his hands stray where he willed. Johanna hadn’t yet decided how far she would let it go: far enough to get her tributes some sponsorship, she hoped, but not so far that she would be trying to scrub off her own skin in the morning. He showed her into a wood-panelled room, plastered himself against her backside, and directed her attention to a pair of chaise lounges. Their elaborate oaken whorls matched the room's paneling.

“They’re from your trees, Johanna. I bought them, when they were culling them from Victors Park. Every single thing in this room, I had made from your trees.” He clutched her more tightly to him, grinding against her body. For a dizzying moment, he reminded her of the whirling blades in Seven’s sawmills, of their inability to distinguish between humans and wood. The man leaned down and began detailing into her ear his fantasies about what Johanna would soon do in this room, on this very furniture, made from her very own trees.

_Remember, if it can cut wood, it can cut you._

Johanna had no intention of becoming lumber.

She didn’t remember leaving the sordid little room. She remembered only the eyes that smoothly slid away from her when she re-entered the ballroom, and the certainty that she had earned herself another visit from the Peacekeepers. _But perhaps no more visits from Capitol dignitaries._ Surely there were only so many times that President Snow was willing to throw his friends into the path of a dangerously crazed Victor?

It didn’t take long for rumors to spread through the room, and the mood soon turned hard against Seven. Blight and Duff gave up their quest for sponsors and returned to the Training Center, but Lars lingered, giving Johanna the occasional doleful look from across the room. She refused to let him approach her: if she had just killed Seven’s tributes, she didn’t want to hear Lars’ opinion of that. She really should have left with Blight and Duff, but Johanna wasn’t ready to go back to the Training Center—or the Tributes—just yet.

She was standing against the wall, feeling twitchy and directionless, when one of the District Three mentors approached her. He was squat and balding, and for the life of her, Johanna could not come up with his name.

“What?” she snapped at him.

“I hear you own a chainsaw,” he said, not quite making eye contact. “I’ve always been fascinated with two-stroke engines, they’re virtually living antiques. But we don’t get them in Three.”

Johanna frowned at him. “They’re made in Three.” Three was where Peacekeeper-controlled technology came from.

“Yes, well.” He gave her a grave smile, his glasses flashing in the light. “Not my part of Three. I’m mostly in electronics. But antique technology is a passion of mine. You’ll have to show me your chainsaw sometime.”

“You want to see my _chainsaw,”_ she repeated.

“Yes,” he said.

“Fine,” she said, mostly because thinking about chainsaws was better than thinking about Peacekeepers, or the two corpses she would be escorting home in a few days. Or about how she had _this_ to look forward to for the rest of her life. She could saddle the Capitol with all the ugly art she could make, and it would just go into wood-panelled rooms made from “her” trees. She chafed for a way to make the Capitol hurt, and was utterly powerless to achieve it.

“All right,” the strange mentor agreed, “I’ll stop by sometime. After the Games are over, maybe.” He faded back into the party.

Not too long after, she hoped. If he waited too long, the Peacekeepers would stop by first, and after that she wouldn’t be able to show anyone anything.

Seven’s Tributes died horribly, as nearly all tributes do, but entirely without sponsorship, which was far less common. Duff and the Parakeet clearly blamed Johanna for it. Blight, true to form, seemed to care as little about the tributes’ deaths as he did about anything else.

Johanna held her head high, refusing to take responsibility for their deaths. Johanna had killed three people in the Arena, deliberately and by her own hand. That had been her choice—as much as you could call it a choice—and she still woke at night feeling the impact of her axe shuddering up through the bones of her arm. But _these_ deaths were on the Capitol. A mentor could help a tribute cheat death once or twice, but do the math however you will, twenty-three tributes would die in the Arena. The twenty-fourth would belong to the Capitol forevermore.

Mentorship, Johanna decided, was just another lie. A few measly scraps of influence, just enough to destroy the mentors with guilt when they failed, while all the real power stayed with the Capitol. Johanna had no real regard for Blight, but she could say this for the man: he had never lied to her. Not about what he could do, nor about how little he cared. Neither before the Arena, nor after.

The next summer, faced with two terrified, young faces on the way to the Seventy-Third Games, Johanna found she could do no better than Blight’s example. She told them the naked truth, and let them hate her for it.

 

The song about the frozen logger faded from the Capitol’s consciousness, but not from Johanna’s. She had been singing it since her childhood, and its portrait of the loggers of Seven—carelessly strong, impervious to pain, too tough for razors—became something she reached for when she needed courage.

And yet even for the song’s mythic hero, a man unfazed by plummeting temperatures, a man who merely buttoned his vest at a hundred below... Even for him, the cold eventually became too great.

> _It froze clear through to China, it froze to the stars above;  
>  At a thousand degrees below zero, it froze my logger love._

Johanna lived alone in her empty house with the Capitol-issued phone that never rang, and felt more and more like that mythic logger: tough enough to survive nearly anything, yet gradually freezing to death.

There was a cruel fellowship among the victors, and each year during the Games, Johanna managed to take a little warmth from it. It was an unspoken rule that no one would partake of that fellowship until their own tributes were dead: there was too much opportunity for espionage among the mentors. But once there was nothing left to lose, each mentor sought out the others to pass the rest of the Games in a drunken haze. Even the ex-Careers chose to drink with the rest: in the Career districts, where volunteering for the Games was a honored tradition, people with a decent slate of choices never ended up in the Arena.

The victors had many drinking games, most of them callous enough enough to make the victors anathema back home, but Johanna’s favorite was the nearly-innocuous one called “Where would you be now, if you had never been a tribute?” The question was like a wound they couldn’t stop licking.

“My life would be exactly the same,” Finnick bragged, sipping the liquid silver of his drink. It was quasi-traditional to answer with one kind of death or another—Victors generally lived longer, even if a messy death in some shitty backwater might have been cleaner in the end—but Finnick was Finnick. “I’d be the toast of the Capitol. Jewels at my feet, crowds cheering my name. A beautiful woman on each arm, and a new one in my bed every night.” Finnick didn’t mention Annie, and no one else did, either.

The Capitol must have known about Finnick and Annie. After all, most of the Victors did, and it was difficult to believe there wasn’t at least one informer among them. Finnick himself might be an informer; there was no question he was under the Capitol's thumb. But that was the rub: they all had secrets, and no one wanted to risk their own by bandying about Finnick's.

Johanna’s secret had come from Volts, the strange little victor from Three with the fetish for antique technology. Up on the roof, where it was easier to sidestep Capitol surveillance, Volts had disabled the Peacekeeper controls on Johanna's chainsaw. The alteration wasn’t of much practical value: using it would simply bring down a death sentence on herself and Volts. If you were looking at one Peacekeeper, there were always twenty more just behind them, and how long could one woman with a chainsaw last? Nevertheless, even if Johanna could never take advantage of it, she enjoyed owning a deadly machine that responded to no one's bidding but her own.

Johanna could guesss that Volts had done similar favors for others. She even had guesses about _who_ and _what_ , which meant that at least some could guess the same about her. The victors were bound to each other in a web of favors and secrets, and that was the real reason no one mentioned Annie: betraying one secret would lead to a cascade of destruction, and there was no telling if you’d be left standing at the end.

Besides, no one wanted to be the one with Annie Cresta's life on their conscience.

“No, you wouldn’t, you liar,” Haymitch rebuked Finnick. Both of Twelve’s Tributes had died at the Cornucopia during the first minutes of the Games, and Haymitch was deep in his cups. “You’d be lost overboard, too stupid to hold onto the rail." He lifted his glass to the company. "Me, I’d be dead in a mine collapse.”

There was a sudden fanfare from the screen above them. The last tribute from Eleven died messily in instant replay. Someone from Two laughed, mocking the panicked decisions that had led to the girl’s death. Haymitch called for everyone to make room for Chaff and the other mentors from Eleven. Lyme gave up her place next to Haymitch and went to refill her drink, a vile concoction that changed color with temperature. It was nearly undrinkable—what Capitol aficionados called ‘an acquired taste’—but it was also insanely expensive, and the Careers had an unerring eye for whatever was most expensive.

Chaff arrived first, the weight of his dead charges visible in the slump of his shoulders. Lyme handed him her own drink as he came through the door. “What you’d be doing right now, if you hadn’t been a Tribute,” she prompted, and took down a new glass for herself.

“Dead in a threshing accident,” Chaff responded, and emptied his glass in four long swallows, too quickly to taste it.

Lyme moved aside to let Chaff mix himself a new drink. “Drowned skinny-dipping in an abandoned quarry,” she offered for herself.

Johanna laughed, because _District Two._ “Oh, come off it, skinny-dipping! Some miner in Twelve would have put a pickaxe in your skull by now.” Lyme’s entire family was Peacekeeper, and had been for three generations. It should have meant her family was too rich for her to end up in the Arena, but Lyme had her secrets, just like the rest of them.

Lyme flicked Johanna a glance. “You’re thinking of Enobaria.”

Enobaria displayed her gold-inlaid teeth. “Hardly. I’d be removing the skin from that miner’s back for having tried it.” She raised her glass to Haymitch. “And enjoying every second of it!”

Haymitch ignored her, which was the best course of action with Enobaria.

“How about you?” Finnick asked Johanna. “Where would you be now, if you hadn’t been a Tribute?”

Usually Johanna made up some gruesome injury for herself in one of Seven’s mills: caught in a ripper, flayed in a veneer peeler, drowned in a pulping vat. But Johanna had been missing her sun-warmed clear-cuts, longing for unsupervised solitude, so different from her closely-monitored isolation.

“Eaten by a bear,” she said. Why a bear might want to eat her when there were acres of huckleberries to be had, Johanna had no idea, but it was the spirit of the thing. In another world, she might be dying a messy death in the woods right now, blissfully ignorant of the play-by-play of this year’s Games.

“Nah,” Haymitch said, his voice thick with bitterness, “Not you. You’re a _survivor,_ Jo.”

Like Haymitch could talk. Two decades spent at the bottom of his bottle, and the man still clung to his life. And for what? She smiled sweetly. “I know you are, but what am I?”

When Haymitch’s grin finally worked its way up through the alcohol, it was hollow with his twenty-three years as a victor. “Touche, sunshine.” He drained his glass and stood. When he came back, he had abandoned his glass for the bottle, the sour, ugly stuff that only Haymitch drank.

 _Don’t become like Haymitch,_ Blight had said to Johanna years before, and Johanna had heard, _don’t let the Capitol murder your loved ones for your errors_. But Johanna had begun to wonder if it wasn’t so much Haymitch's initial grief and guilt for his family that had turned him into this flailing wreck, as it was his twenty years of brutal self-isolation since. Johanna could feel the cold sucking at her—the Peacekeepers watching her, the people of Seven shunning her, the citizens of the Capitol pawing at her, the endless smear campaign, the need to not take any confidantes lest she bring disaster down on someone else—and she thought she saw that same cold gnawing away at Haymitch, but with twenty years to do its work.

But the alternative was to be Finnick, terrified and helpless over what the Capitol might do to his beloved. Even if they miraculously didn’t know about Annie yet, Finnick lived in ongoing terror that they _might_.

 _A hundred degrees below zero._ Johanna buttoned up her vest and pretended she wasn't freezing to death.

 

Then the Quarter Quell was announced, and the icy truth of it settled straight into Johanna’s bones and stayed, even as some hysterical part of her insisted that the announcement was _wrong, a lie, not allowed, against the rules_.

(But what rules were there in the Capitol, beyond the rule of the Capitol itself?)

Up until its very last moments, the Seventy-Fourth Games had seemed like any other, and as ever, the mood among the victors was dominated by bitter resignation and morbid humor. When in the last seconds of the Games the Gamemakers had recanted on allowing two victors, reinstating the usual rule that there would be only one, several in the room had laughed at the devastated expressions of the last two tributes. Because really, what had they expected, _mercy?_ During the _Games?_ A few victors were openly derisive about Katniss’s ability to kill her fellow tribute, and speculated on what hell her life would become in Twelve if she did. A few others expected her would-be lover to settle the question by committing suicide—easily done, just loosen the tourniquet on his leg—and were yelling at Peeta to grow a spine. But the widespread consensus in the room was that the Games were likely to drag on while the Gamemakers worked out how to separate the pair and murder one of them.

Then the victors began shushing each other, as they realized Katniss Everdeen had successfully maneuvered the Capitol into a game of chicken. Abruptly, shockingly, the Gamemakers conceded to Katniss’s bluff, and an electrified silence fell over the room.

“Holy fucking hell,” someone whispered, “she beat the Capitol.”

“Hush your mouth,” someone else snapped.

Johanna glanced around the room. Many seemed uneasy and confused, a few were openly angry. Volts was nodding grimly at the screen, his expression hard. Finnick's eyes caught Johanna's, and she felt commingled hope and terror catch in her. _It was possible to beat the Capitol. It was possible to win._

“And for the first time in Hunger Games history,” Chaff drawled in his deep velvet voice, “we have a mentor with a shorter life-expectancy than her tributes. Haymitch will be _so_ proud.”

And like that, the mood broke, the room bursting into nervous laughter. Because of course Katniss Everdeen hadn’t beaten the Capitol. _No one_ was allowed to beat the Capitol.

Any yet nothing quite settled back into its old tracks. Nearly every person in that room had done the unthinkable to win their own games, and for a few short moments, they had all scented the possibility of victory again. Katniss Everdeen might as well have thrown raw meat among a pack of wolves.

Johanna waited for the Capitol to crush Katniss Everdeen, but aside from the speedy death of the Head Gamemaker, the Capitol seemed paralyzed by indecision. Days turned into weeks, and then months, and nothing happened. For the first time in her short career as a victor, Johanna looked forward to the Victory Tour, eager to discover who Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark actually were behind the obfuscations of the Capitol press machine.

Then word was passed through Victory Village that all four of Seven’s victors had been disinvited from the celebrations. It seemed that all the victors, in all the Districts, had been barred from meeting the two latest additions to their company.

“The Capitol’s afraid of us,” Johanna breathed to Duff, barely daring to say it aloud.

Duff only smiled back at her, his grin as bloodthirsty as Enobaria’s.

The mood had caught among the people of District Seven, too. Even in Johanna’s isolation, she could feel it: the fast idle of a chainsaw in the moment before the clutch caught. Extra platoons of Peacekeepers arrived in Seven—to put down an uprising in the south of the District, according to the rumors—and then stayed to quash any possibility of another.

Even knowing that the Capitol would have some fresh hell in store for them for the Quarter Quell, Johanna couldn’t help but itch for what might happen with all the victors together again.

Then the Quarter Quell was announced, and the world crashed back into its old order. Rather than admitting that the situation had slipped their control and disappearing Katniss Everdeen into some backwater Peacekeeper jail, the Capitol had decided to simply put her back in the Arena and make sure she died there. Conveniently for the Capitol, half the victors would die with her, along with whatever rebellious spirit had grown among them.

In three months, Katniss Everdeen would be dead, that was assured. Johanna Mason, the only female victor from Seven, would be dead along with her. After all, the wolf-in-sheep's-clothing gambit was the kind of thing that only worked once. No one would underestimate her this time.

 _A thousand degrees below zero._ Sooner or later, even loggers froze to death.

Johanna felt the laughter bubbling up inside of her, because she had known, _known_ , that the Capitol would kill her eventually. She wasn’t the kind of survivor Haymitch was, holding on forever for no reason at all. At some point the Capitol would demand something of her that she abhorred more than the prospect of her own death, and then the Capitol would kill her for it. But if they were going to be so stupid as to kill her with three months’ advance warning, she was going to make them suffer for it.

She picked up her chainsaw, and went to see Blight.

His nephew, a year younger than Johanna, opened the door. “Where’s Blight?” she asked, shouldering past him.

“Now’s not—” the young man protested. Johanna turned her glare on him. “Upstairs,” he quailed.

Blight, when she found him, was in a half-darkened room, slouched deep into a chair, a drink in his hand, staring at nothing. He glanced at her and her chainsaw before returning his gaze to the wall. “You’re early to negotiate an alliance. Try waiting until I've been reaped.”

“Here to get my saw fixed,” she said. She dropped it on the low table in front of him.

“Your saw fixed,” he repeated blankly.

“I’m going to make some amazing art, move everyone in the Capitol to tears. They’ll have no choice but to cancel the Quarter Quell.”

He scowled. “Get out, Johanna. Go bother someone else. Try Lars, he actually likes you.”

“Lars doesn’t know anything about chainsaws.” When Blight didn't respond, she put her foot on the table and shoved it hard into his knees. He snapped a glare at her, and there, _there_ was the killing instinct in his eyes, the thing that had gotten him through the Arena the first time. She bared her teeth back at him: she was a killer, too. “I have three months to live, Blight.”

He snorted. “Why, you planning on dying that easily?”

“Why, you planning on underestimating me again?” She held his eyes, willing him not to write her off a second time. They could still be allies. She _needed_ them to be allies. Not in the Arena, _fuck_ the Arena, but here.

He squinted at her. “What’s wrong with it?” he finally asked.

This time, Johanna’s grin was genuine. “It won’t stop running.”

“Dieseling, you mean.” He reached for the saw.

She snatched it away before he could touch it. “Outside, where the light’s better.” _Outside, where the surveillance is lighter._ He frowned, but followed her readily enough.

“I think I already know what’s wrong with it,” Johanna said, once they were outside. She removed the engine cover, fixing in her mind what Volts had done on the Training Center roof. Blight stood over her, arms crossed. Johanna had no idea how good he was at mechanics; she had had a difficult enough time herself following Volts’ demonstration. “See,” she showed him, indicating a wire that Volts had cut, “this bit here has become disattached…” She walked him through the modifications Volts had made, one by one, and then looked up, willing him to understand. “And now it won’t stop running.”

_And now the Peacekeepers can’t shut it off._

Blight said nothing, and Johanna waited. She could hear the voices of his family inside the house. _Don’t be like Haymitch,_ Blight had said to her, long ago. It didn’t matter much to Johanna if the Peacekeepers could trace this act of rebellion back to her: she was already a dead woman walking, and there was no one they could hurt on her behalf. But Blight had family. A brother, who had children of his own. She would have gone to Lars or Duff, who had less to lose, but they didn’t know anyone in the logging camps.

Something about Blight’s stance became more stolid. “Keeps dieseling, you mean.” Frustration flared in Johanna, but then he looked at her, and the ferocity in his eyes made her breath catch. “I’ll ask my brother to look at it.”

Johanna shut her eyes in relief. Blight’s brother worked in the logging camps. She stood back from the saw.

He reached down to pick it up in one large hand. “I don’t want to see you again until the Reaping,” he warned.

Johanna nodded. That was fair. There was no knowing what she had just brought down on his family. She had probably just killed Volts, too, but she had to believe that Volts had already made his choices, had known what Johanna might do with the secret he had given her. The logging camps would be armed soon. District Seven would become a saw with the clutch _engaged_ , the chain racing over the bar at sixty miles an hour.

She could only hope the Capitol would be so careless as to touch the bar tip to wood.

In the meanwhile, she might be a dead woman, but dead loggers were made of sawblades, and sawblades weren’t picky about what you put in front of them.

_If it can cut wood, it can cut you._

Johanna Mason had three months. She knew exactly how much damage a sawblade could do.

 

**Author's Note:**

>  **The Frozen Logger** , James Stevens
> 
> As I sat down one evening in a logging town cafe,  
> A seven-foot tall waitress to me these words did say:
> 
> I see that you are a logger, and not just a common bum,  
> 'Cause no one but a logger stirs his coffee with is thumb.
> 
> My lover was a logger, there's none like him today;  
> If you'd pour whiskey on it he could eat a bale of hay.
> 
> He never shaved his whiskers from off of his horny hide;  
> He'd just drive them in with a hammer and bite them off inside.
> 
> [...]
> 
> I saw my lover leaving, sauntering through the snow,  
> Going gaily homeward at forty-eight below.
> 
> The weather tried to freeze him, it tried its level best;  
> At a hundred degrees below zero, he buttoned up his vest.
> 
> It froze clean through to China, it froze to the stars above;  
> At a thousand degrees below zero, it froze my logger love.
> 
> They tried in vain to thaw him, and would you believe me, sir  
> They made him into axeblades, to chop the Douglas fir.
> 
> And so I lost my lover, and to this café I come,  
> And here I wait till someone stirs his coffee with his thumb.


End file.
